Hi guys, I'm new to Poser 12 and I've been trying to learn it. I've been trying to play around with some settings and some of my own research on the internet. I'm trying to find out how I can increase render quality on Mac, if that's even possible. I'm on a macbook air. I can't do as much as I'd like to with the program given my technology, but I'd like to push it to whatever the ceiling may be. 

Additionally, I'm just curious on a few things. What determines max render quality? Is it the graphics card of a computer? Do you guys have any recommendations for powerful laptops that work well with Poser and produce good quality renders? 

Thanks and I'm sorry if this is a dumb question. 

Hi, ippo1236. No questions are dumb. Okay? I'm on Windows not a Mac. If you want to find out about the specs needed to run p12, stop by posersoftware.com and read up what's the minimum requirement for running software on Mac or Apple computer.  

Render quality is determined by how much processing time vs. power is applied to the image.  That power comes in many forms.  A powerful graphics card with CUDA can speed up a render a lot.  More cores/threads a CPU has can speed up a render.  If nothing else more time will result in a better render.

Render quality is determined by how much processing time vs. power is applied to the image.  That power comes in many forms.  A powerful graphics card with CUDA can speed up a render a lot.  More cores/threads a CPU has can speed up a render.  If nothing else more time will result in a better render.

No more time as in a render can be 10 minutes or 60 minutes.

No more time as in a render can be 10 minutes or 60 minutes.

That is not true, you will just spend more time rendering. Are you using Firefly or Superfly when you render? I can suggest some settings to try.

Will be a bit, I am not back at my render compy until later tomorrow.

I found these settings worked well on my old computer for most images. I don't know what kind of specs a MacBook air has. But I figure it probably is better than something that might have been mid-ranged in 2012.

And don't forget that it means 10x10=100 diffuse samples, 100 glossy samples, 20 transmission samples, etc...

Okay, here is one that I generally get very good results with in Superfly with my not-very-new machine. Disclaimer: I am on a Windows box, not a Mac, so I have no claims for any of this being suitable for what you have, but it will give you an idea.

If your machine chokes on that, try the below draft and see how that looks. Then experiment with the in-betweens. 

I'm several generations behind such uber-tech but, IMHO, 'superfly, progressive' seems to thrive on pixel-sample count: The more, the faster.

Lots of light helps, too...

I do test-renders with 14 pixel-samples, WIPs with 32, 'nice' with 64, 'good' with 96 and 'over-kill' with eg 256, run overnight.

Until my ageing twin GPU cards max-out on scene complexity, they like 1024 vols+buckets. I can push them a lot further by reducing via 256, 128 to  64. My CAD-Tower's CPU cores and network-render 'Box' also take that 64...